“Such a doctrine,” says Lavrov, and rightly, “did not in the least disarm the enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with what its success threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian energy and, as it were, deliberately blinded it in the face of its irreconcilable enemies.” (Page 137) But this enfeebling doctrine was inextricably bound up with the fiction of democracy. The form of mock legality it was that allowed them to think that the problem would be solved without a struggle. “As far as the mass of the population is concerned,” writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, “it was to a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the very least, a hidden agreement with the Government.” Unable to attract the bourgeoisie, the compromisers, as always, deceived the proletariat.
The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable and already beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed only the compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the senseless procedure of the supplementary elections to the Commune of April 6. At this moment, “it was no longer a question of voting,” writes Arthur Arnould. “The situation had become so tragic that there was not either the time or the calmness necessary for the correct functioning of the elections ... All persons devoted to the Commune were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost detachments ... The people attributed no importance whatever to these supplementary elections. The elections were in reality merely parliamentarism. What was required was not to count voters, but to have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained in the Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese.” From these words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so simple to combine class war with interclass democracy.
“The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly,” wrote in his book, Milliard, one of the best brains of the Commune. “It is a military Council. It must have one aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law, the law of social salvation.”